Just noticed, buried in Gallup's recent polling on public attitudes towards socialism, an age trend that seems to have passed under the radar of the discourse. To highlight it, I've committed a data visualization heresy by zooming in on the 20-60 percent range - this does not give a good sense of overall scale, but it does make the trajectories a little more visible:

As I argued recently, I really don't think that these fluctuations are terribly significant: since 2010, the only age group to have shifted their views on socialism outside the margin of error are Generation Xers (+5 in the past eight years).

But if you are going to try to tease out a change in the microtrends, it's hard to miss what's going on here: the 2016 election temporarily polarized views between millennials and everyone else, and since then, attitudes towards socialism have generally drifted back to the norm. The much-heralded dictatorship of the teen has gone soft; olds, meanwhile, are becoming more radical across the board.

The upshot of course is that public support for socialism has generally grown over the course of generations rather than years. Perhaps socialists who want to build institutions and win political power can underperform or overperform the expectations these numbers imply, but we should at the very least maintain a clear view of how our base of support has actually changed in the past decade or so.